The present compiled dissertation explores culture jamming as a social movement in late capitalist information society. Culture jamming embraces groups and individuals practicing symbolic protest against the expansion and domination of large corporations and the logic of the market into public and private life. The central aim is to understand the meaning of culture jamming; its “model” of collective identification, and its protest and mobilizing strategies. International social movement research mostly focuses upon well established movements that are traditionally organized and directed against conventional political institutions. Studying culture jamming as a social movement therefore entails implications for social movement theory and research. For instance, concepts must be adjusted to cover emerging “individualized” forms of collective action and the effects of cyberspace on collective identification. Furthermore, attention is directed to emotions in culture jamming. It is thereby also argued that social movement research generally may have a lot to gain from incorporating emotion theory. Data consists of texts and visuals from the organization Adbusters Media Foundation, and seven interviews with culture jammers. The groups represented in the interviews are Institute for Applied Autonomy, Reverend Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping, New York Surveillance Camera Players, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Rtmark, and the French Casseurs de Pub. The method of analysis is “abductive” qualitative text analysis inspired by hermeneutic qualitative analysis and the epistemological and ontological foundations of discourse theory and post-structuralism. Analysis is carried out in five separate studies presented in text I-IV (previously published) and in chapter eight. Text I maps the Adbusters Media Foundation (AMF) along the lines of narrative, organization, ends, means, and strategy. Text II offers an analysis of the various nodal points in the AMF discourse and discusses the tensions inherent to the AMF effort to “hegemonize” the meaning of culture jamming. Text III offers an analysis of culture jamming as political activism from the thematic perspective of culture, place and identity, based on four of the interviews. In text IV the AMF visuals are analyzed from the perspective of emotions and social movement mobilization. Chapter eight brings together the seven interviews and the AMF material into an analysis of emotions in culture jamming.

La sustitución del mundo maravilloso encantado por el reencantamiento tecnológico plantea una serie de problemas que atañen al advenimiento de la era digital. Nuestra Tesis intenta aproximarse a una teorización crítica del nuevo entorno virtual. En primer lugar, contextualizando las teorías sobre la técnica y la tecnología con la nueva realidad tecnocientífica, de la que surge una regresión al encantamiento arcaico. En segundo lugar, proponemos relacionar las nuevas tecnologías con el contexto socioeconómico del tardocapitalismo. En tercer lugar, nos ocupamos del reencantamiento en su vertiente digital, a través del condicionamiento estético, la mediación invisible de la experiencia y la afirmación de la unidimensionalidad en la sociedad digital. Como conclusión, la extrañeza con la que afrontamos el estudio de la comunicación digital nos hace vislumbrar en el ciberespacio una segunda realidad maravillosa e inestable, que actúa como fuente de poder al servicio de la economía neoliberal de mercado. / The substitution of the enchanted and wonder world by the technological renchanting offers a sequence of problems concerning the rising of digital era. Our Thesis tries to approach to a critical theorization of the new virtual environment. Firstly, by contextualizing the theories about technique and technology, according with the technoscience and the consecutive return to the enchantment. Secondly, we propose to connect new technologies with the socialeconomic context of late capitalism. Thirdly, we realize the renchanting concerning the digital dimension, through the aesthetic constraints, the invisible mediation of the experience and the affirmation of unidimensionality in digital society. As conclusion, the strangeness in relation to the studies concerning digital communication expect us to treat cyberspace as a wonder and instable second reality, that evolves a power source for neoliberalist and market economy.

No \"campo ampliado\" da cultura contemporânea, arte e arquitetura partilham cada vez mais questões comuns. Assim, seja em relações de colaboração, ou seja em relações de afrontamento, a arquitetura e a arte hoje dissolvem suas antigas fronteiras disciplinares para compor um poderoso complexo social e midiático, cujo sentido é fundamental para a compreensão do mundo contemporâneo. Sem isolar a problemática brasileira em relação ao conjunto da produção mundial, esse trabalho se propõe o desafio de pensar o eclipsamento da tectônica, da materialidade e da noção de trabalho em um mundo globalizado e dominado por produções imateriais de valor, como o capital financeiro. Evitando estabelecer um juízo definitivo sobre essa questão, procura-se entender como as produções de alguns arquitetos e artistas contemporâneos lidam com a realidade de um mundo cada vez mais impalpável e convertido em imagem, isto é, consumido permanentemente. A hipótese assumida aqui é a de que, na impossibilidade de se restaurar a resistência do mundo e da matéria - que pudesse recolocar em causa a \"estética da formatividade\" moderna -, alguns dos melhores artistas e arquitetos contemporâneos traduzem o dilema atual na forma de uma perda de foco da imagem ou do objeto, que se traduz também em uma voluntária busca pela ausência de forma. Desse modo, a poética do informe e a nuvem são, a meu ver, expressões potentes da crise contemporânea. / In the \"expanded field\" of contemporary culture, arts and architecture increasingly share common issues. Hence, whether in relations of collaboration or confrontation, arts and architecture dissolve their old disciplinary boundaries to form a powerful social and media framework, which meaning is essential for the understanding of the contemporary world. Encompassing the Brazilian problematic in relation to the body of international production, this research attempts to undertake the challenge of reflecting about the hiding tectonic, materiality and perception of work in a globalized world dominated by the immaterial production of value, such as the financial capital. Although this research precludes a definitive judgment about this issue, it attempts to understand how the outputs of some contemporary architects and artists deal with the reality of a world that is ever more intangible and converted in images, and in other words, permanently consumed. The hypothesis posed here is that, in the impossibility of restoring the resistance of the world and matter - which would put back in discussion the modern \"formativeness of aesthetics\" -, some of the most prestigious contemporary artists and architects translate the current dilemma in the loss of focus in images or objects, which also translates itself in a voluntary search for the absence of form. Hence, the poetics of formless and clouds are, from my point of view, powerful expressions of the contemporary crises.

No description available.

The heterogeneous field of posthuman theory allows for an account of community under the convergence of late capitalism and high technology and its spread to a global scale. Spanning bioconservative fears of a potential loss of agency and a human ‘essence’ through advances in technology, ‘transhumanist’ hopes for a biological transformation that would fulfil liberal goals for human development, as well as postmodern, feminist interpretations of the posthuman as instantiating a liberating break with liberal ideology and patriarchal structures, theories of the posthuman offer a productive starting point for exploring the transformations in understandings of human subjectivity and community at the turn of the twenty-first century. Placing the concept of community against a background of past totalitarianism and a possible future of an uncontested globalised neoliberal regime that high technology risks intensifying, the present study enquires into the possibility of a community that would escape the metaphysical logic of mastery subtending both past and present models of community and suggests that problematizing representations of the creation of what a strand in contemporary philosophy terms a non-totalising ‘communauté désoeuvrée’ and implicit proposals not for the revival of community as a teleological ‘oeuvre’, but for its rewriting may be found in works by Maurice G. Dantec, Michel Houellebec, and Antoine Volodine, works which have been labelled posthuman themselves by virtue of their incorporation of posthuman themes or structures that come in the shape of representations and problematisations of high technology and its intersection with late capitalism and narrative structures that mimic or subvert conceptions of subjectivity that can loosely be termed posthuman. These novelists write in a context of an ideological, technological, and commercial constraint that hampers literary and political agency and which is problematized both implicitly and explicitly in the use these writers make of representations of violence and literary strategies such as irony, ambiguity, and hermeticism. These representations and strategies, it will be suggested, could be read as subtle attempts to bypass those constraints and restore the potential of literary production to comment on and even intervene in the creation of community in a posthuman age.

Esta tese tem como objetivo investigar a emergência de uma escola brasileira de Geografia cujas bases foram lançadas pelo geógrafo francês Pierre Monbeig. Seus anos de formação na Sorbonne, os anos em que viveu no Brasil, até os anos em que publicou suas principais contribuições sobre este país (1925-1957) demarcam o período do processo de formação da geografia brasileira sob sua liderança, visto como um percurso ao mesmo tempo material e simbólico. Uma geo-história dos saberes, que tem como eixos de análise as esferas das lentidões, da circulação e das rupturas, foi o método mobilizado para apreender uma trajetória que é atingida por movimentos profundos da constituição das ciências, bem como em conjunturas de eclipsam as longas tendências na primeira metade do século XX. Tais movimentos de longa duração são aqui caracterizados como a erosão dos valores literários, que dominaram as ciências francesas em fins do século XIX; a tentação à ação e ao engajamento, numa forma tendencial que caminha para uma crescente aplicação das ciências; e uma progressiva explicitação dos métodos científicos. Face à conjuntura e a determinismos específicos do Brasil, da formação do Estado nacional, da crise das oligarquias e do avanço do capitalismo tardio, as respostas a estas tendências, de uma ciência em contexto de recuperação de suas heranças, mas também de deslocamento, são singulares, e as transformações que a geografia de Pierre Monbeig vai sofrer nesse espaço são institucionais, teóricas e temporalmente específicas. Assim Monbeig elabora raciocínios que, sem negar as heranças e as tensões latentes, estão permeados por resultados diretos em torno da compreensão dos processos geográficos da modernização e da lógica espacial de subdesenvolvimento dos territórios em processo de colonização, e, indiretos, em torno de uma teoria geográfica adaptada às condições do capitalismo brasileiro, que nós denominados como géo-histórica do capitalismo periférico, com base em raciocínios sistêmicos. Por fim, será necessário ressaltar que tais contribuições epistemológicas, se não se anunciaram como uma ruptura às heranças da vertente da geografia francesa que ele adota, constituem, para as ciências humanas, uma fortuna crítica da Geografia desenvolvida no Brasil, pouco reconhecida nos debates historiográficos. / This thesis aims at investigating the emergence of a Brazilian school of Geography whose foundation was built by the French geographer Pierre Monbeig. His years studying at Sorbonne, his yeas spent in Brazil, and even the year in which he published his first contributions on this country (1925-1957) define the period in which Brazilian geography came to be, under his leadership; this was, at the same time, a material and a symbolic process. This research used a geohistory of knowledge that analyses the spheres of slowness, circulation, and ruptures to study a trajectory that is influenced by deep movements of the constitution of the sciences, as well as circumstances of the sciences that eclipse the long-lasting tendencies in the first half of the twentieth century. These long-lasting movements are characterized here as: erosion of literary values, which dominated French sciences in the end of the nineteenth century; temptation to action and engagement, in the form of a tendency towards a growing application of sciences; and a progressive clarification of the scientific method. In face of the situation and of Brazil-specific determinisms, the formation of the national State, the crises of oligarchies, and the advancement of late capitalism, the answers of a science in context of recovering its inheritances, but also of displacement, to these trends are singular and the transformations that Pierre Monbeig\'s geography goes through in this space are institutional, theoretical and temporally specific to that time. Thereby, Monbeig elaborates reasonings that, without denying latent heritage and tension, are direct results of understanding geographical processes of modernization and of the spacial logic of underdevelopment in territories in process of colonization, and by indirect results of a geographical theory adapted to the conditions of Brazilian capitalism, which we denominate a geohistory of the peripheral capitalism based on systemic reasoning. Finally, it is important to point out that these epistemological contributions were not announced as a break with the French geography the author adopts; they constitute, to the humanities, a critical source of information for Geography as it was developed in Brazil, which gets little recognition in historiographic debates.

Miwa Yanagi’s Elevator Girls series, a collection of glossy photographs featuring groups of similarly clad women lingering in expansive, empty arcades, made its international debut in 1996. While the pieces garnered positive reactions, Yanagi found that most Western viewers read her work as predominantly “Oriental”—confirming stereotypes of a highly polished techno-topic Japan that was still negotiating gender equality. In this thesis, I explore alternative ways of reading Yanagi’s Elevator Girls series, which, I argue, call attention to myopic views of commercialism and identity in order to provide an alternative reading of these women as agents of transgression and ideological transcendence. Whereas many viewed Yanagi’s works as a comment on capitalist machinations, where consumerism has produced soulless, vapid feminine identities, I focus on the ways in which these women exercise agency without relying on notions of an individualized, unique ego.

Esta tese tem como objetivo investigar a emergência de uma escola brasileira de Geografia cujas bases foram lançadas pelo geógrafo francês Pierre Monbeig. Seus anos de formação na Sorbonne, os anos em que viveu no Brasil, até os anos em que publicou suas principais contribuições sobre este país (1925-1957) demarcam o período do processo de formação da geografia brasileira sob sua liderança, visto como um percurso ao mesmo tempo material e simbólico. Uma geo-história dos saberes, que tem como eixos de análise as esferas das lentidões, da circulação e das rupturas, foi o método mobilizado para apreender uma trajetória que é atingida por movimentos profundos da constituição das ciências, bem como em conjunturas de eclipsam as longas tendências na primeira metade do século XX. Tais movimentos de longa duração são aqui caracterizados como a erosão dos valores literários, que dominaram as ciências francesas em fins do século XIX; a tentação à ação e ao engajamento, numa forma tendencial que caminha para uma crescente aplicação das ciências; e uma progressiva explicitação dos métodos científicos. Face à conjuntura e a determinismos específicos do Brasil, da formação do Estado nacional, da crise das oligarquias e do avanço do capitalismo tardio, as respostas a estas tendências, de uma ciência em contexto de recuperação de suas heranças, mas também de deslocamento, são singulares, e as transformações que a geografia de Pierre Monbeig vai sofrer nesse espaço são institucionais, teóricas e temporalmente específicas. Assim Monbeig elabora raciocínios que, sem negar as heranças e as tensões latentes, estão permeados por resultados diretos em torno da compreensão dos processos geográficos da modernização e da lógica espacial de subdesenvolvimento dos territórios em processo de colonização, e, indiretos, em torno de uma teoria geográfica adaptada às condições do capitalismo brasileiro, que nós denominados como géo-histórica do capitalismo periférico, com base em raciocínios sistêmicos. Por fim, será necessário ressaltar que tais contribuições epistemológicas, se não se anunciaram como uma ruptura às heranças da vertente da geografia francesa que ele adota, constituem, para as ciências humanas, uma fortuna crítica da Geografia desenvolvida no Brasil, pouco reconhecida nos debates historiográficos. / This thesis aims at investigating the emergence of a Brazilian school of Geography whose foundation was built by the French geographer Pierre Monbeig. His years studying at Sorbonne, his yeas spent in Brazil, and even the year in which he published his first contributions on this country (1925-1957) define the period in which Brazilian geography came to be, under his leadership; this was, at the same time, a material and a symbolic process. This research used a geohistory of knowledge that analyses the spheres of slowness, circulation, and ruptures to study a trajectory that is influenced by deep movements of the constitution of the sciences, as well as circumstances of the sciences that eclipse the long-lasting tendencies in the first half of the twentieth century. These long-lasting movements are characterized here as: erosion of literary values, which dominated French sciences in the end of the nineteenth century; temptation to action and engagement, in the form of a tendency towards a growing application of sciences; and a progressive clarification of the scientific method. In face of the situation and of Brazil-specific determinisms, the formation of the national State, the crises of oligarchies, and the advancement of late capitalism, the answers of a science in context of recovering its inheritances, but also of displacement, to these trends are singular and the transformations that Pierre Monbeig\'s geography goes through in this space are institutional, theoretical and temporally specific to that time. Thereby, Monbeig elaborates reasonings that, without denying latent heritage and tension, are direct results of understanding geographical processes of modernization and of the spacial logic of underdevelopment in territories in process of colonization, and by indirect results of a geographical theory adapted to the conditions of Brazilian capitalism, which we denominate a geohistory of the peripheral capitalism based on systemic reasoning. Finally, it is important to point out that these epistemological contributions were not announced as a break with the French geography the author adopts; they constitute, to the humanities, a critical source of information for Geography as it was developed in Brazil, which gets little recognition in historiographic debates.

No description available.

The study explores, through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, the existence of Mode 2 knowledge and programmes in the South African higher education sector. It begins by theorising about knowledge and takes as a point of departure the propositions about theory-building which state that to explain social phenomena, a system of ideas is required, the conceptual tools of which are able to explain the essential dynamics of such phenomena. It goes on to describe a crisis in a system of ideas that, together with valid critiques, demands to be re-examined as well as the potential for advancing alternative lines of thought. A critical reading and understanding of existing theories leads me to believe that independently, they are all inadequate to explain the relationship between knowledge production and South African higher education in an era of globalisation. This includes the all-encompassing framework of neo-Marxism, the excessive consumerism of academic capitalism, the equation of the worker with modern technology in post-industrialism and the`lax relativity', complacent and, indiscriminate celebration of diversity in post-modernism. By combining the `culturally sensitive' critical post-modernism of William Tierney and George Subotzky with the concept of `late capitalism' as proposed by Frederic Jameson, it is possible to establish a relationship between globalisation and South African higher education on the one hand, and between its' policy and knowledge production on the other. Against the features of the newly proffered theoretical framework of `critical postmodernism in late capitalism', the study examines the new higher education policy and legislation and ensuing discourse, with particular reference to the Gibbons thesis. It then explores, by using an empirical investigation, the extent to which Mode 2 knowledge production exists in South African higher education. This is done through a selected programme from a former technikon in that demonstrates the key assumptions and perceptions about Mode 2 as held by lecturing staff and as embedded in the structure, design and content of the programme. With the results obtained the study finally makes recommendations for the establishment of a paradigm-shift and for new practices in knowledge production in higher education in South Africa. / Educational Studies / D. Ed. (Comparative Education)